Pure facts or crude stereotypes?

Weird people somewhere North, living in one of the safest countries in the world, speaking on the the most difficult languages in the world? Yes.

Finland is a country of thousands lakes and endless forests. Our nature is clean, our air is clean, even our water is so clean that you could drink it from the toilet seat. We have those famous incredible Aurora Borealis, wild nature, animals like bears, reindeers, reindeers, bears.. And.. there is always cold in Finland? Usyally, yes. All lovely four seasons. Spring, summer, autumn, winter. Wintertime is long and dark, and this time we call KAAMOS. It is totally basic to get desperate because of it. Nowadays there might be even less light because of climate changing and having less snow in winter time. Every spring we get shocked when we see the sun again and it takes time to get used to it again. But you should be better to get used to it, because in summer the sun is shining all day and all night. Its better to have a evening-job or blackout curtain if you want get sleep in summertime.

We are silent and shy. We really enjoy the silence and loneliness and we say something only when we have to – or when we have something important to say. To us is quite familiar to feel uncomfortable in social situations and we do not know the word ”small-talk”. And it is totally okay to have long silent gaps in a conversation. Our most popular topic is weather and we never get tired of talking about it.
We do not spent our days daydreaming – we think it is good to have feet on the ground. We have the Finnish thing called SISU. The thing that help us go trough nearly everything that we decide to. We are honest hard-workers and have relentless work ethic.
Finnish people always follow rules. If the road is empty and you can not see a soul anywhere, but the traffic light is red, you don’t cross the street. We are precise and usually always on time – but our trains are always late.

When we are kids (or just sick at home) we watch Moomins. We love to ski and play ice hockey and when our parents where kids they all went to school by cross-country skiing. And some of us are still doing it. Quite many, actually. We eat weird things like salmiakki, mämmi, rye bred, Karelia pie and potatoes. Okay potatoes are not weird but we eat them all the time. We love to sauna. For us it is totally normal to be naked in front of a stranger and for example go to swim in a lake – even in a wintertime and even if the lake is frozen. (But you should have a hole in it, of course.) Our humor is black and we are sarcastic people. We do not like to be touched by strangers and there is also people who don’t hug even their best friends. Our own space is important to us and the space is also something we really have here. When the fall comes, we go to the forest to pick berries and mushrooms and then freeze them and eat them all year. In summer the best thing for us is to go out of city in to the forest to spend time in summer cottage. That is the place where is no electricity or other luxuries – and there we can enjoy nature, go sauna and swim in a lake. And.. Yes. We might drink often and when we drink we drink way too much. But it is also the time when you can talk with us, because when we are drunk we finally talk (- before we are too drunk to talk anymore). And whatever other people will say – we know the real Santa Claus is living in Finland.

Okay okay. Maybe these things are just crude, irritating stereotypes and of course Finland is so much more. The question about being finnish is actually not so easy today, because the country, its culture and population is developing and changing all the time. But anyway , I guess there is always a kind of truth hidden in a joke.

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Welcome!

This blog is your window to Finnishness. Here you will find blog posts written by students of Tampere University of Applied Sciences (TAMK) describing their personal experiences and notions of being a Finn or living in Finland. This blog is part of the course "Intercultural Experiences and Competences" and was started in spring 2016.

You can use the tag cloud to find posts with specific contents, and to find posts from a specific month, use the navigation at the bottom of the page titled “Blog Post Archive”. Feel free to leave comments as well! Enjoy!